Tahoe Hijack

by Todd Borg

  “When it came time to think about college, I helped them utilize their tech knowledge in their applications. Maya got a full scholarship to Sac State studying software engineering, and three and a half years later she graduated and got hired by Intel. You don’t even want to know how much she makes. Lola got almost a full ride at a small technical school in San Jose. She quit school early when she got hired at a new tech startup. Small salary, but huge stock options. If the company goes big, that girl who grew up in a tenement will be worth millions.”

  “And all these years later, they still have their own websites?”

  “Yeah! It’s great. They’re both happy with their careers. None of their other high school classmates who shared a similar limited background even went to college. And not that making lots of money is the end all, but these girls don’t know of anyone else from their high school, regardless of background, who is doing as well as they are.”

  “And it was all possible because of the technology you taught them,” I said.

  “Yeah. I’m not bragging when I say it. I’m just recognizing what is. If you teach girls high-tech skills, it gives them a giant advantage in this high-tech world.”

  “Is that your dream? To teach high-tech to girls?”

  “Exactly! I want to start a school, Owen! I want to focus on girls who have been marginalized by their circumstances, whether they grew up in the inner-city projects, or whether they just struggled with difficult family circumstances. I’ve done quite a bit of research. It can be like a charter school where they still get the basic subjects. But there would be an intense additional focus on technology.

  “It would take a lot of money, but there are grants available. And I’ve talked to a couple of corporate people who said their companies might be willing to help.”

  “Because they would be the beneficiaries,” I said.

  “Right. The problem is that I can’t move forward on this until I can rejoin the world. I’d have to be a public figure of sorts, running a school, seeking funding, promoting the concept. So it will have to wait until we know for sure that the dead hijacker was my stalker. And if he wasn’t, then we have to find the stalker and put him in prison.”

  “A school sounds like a good plan, Anna.”

  “It would be great. I would so love it!”

  “Changing the lives of girls who might otherwise have few opportunities,” I said.

  “Yes! Girls who might get pregnant and drop out. Girls who might turn to drugs. Girls who think that their future is going to be nothing more than that of the struggling people around them. I could offer them a dream. I could offer them hope. I could show them a clear path to great jobs. I could even show them how to start their own tech businesses.” The excitement in her voice was effervescent.

  “A lot of software engineers are women,” I said. “I did something at Intel once and half of the employees were women.”

  “Sure. Women have lots of jobs in software. But I’m talking about the next level. It’s like moving girls from the nursing side of medicine to the doctor side, to the cutting-edge research side. To do that, you have to get to girls when they’re young, not when they’re starting college or even high school. Of course, the business of software is complicated and women excel at it. But I’m talking about turning women into the creators of the next technology world. Dreaming up new paradigms. Building new companies. The boys who excel and ultimately create the new technology started learning it in middle school. Grade school. When we do that for girls, the world will change.” She took a breath.

  I waited.

  “Do you want to know the name of the school?” she said. She made a little puff of air like she was about to giggle, but then she cut it off. I wondered if she’d ever laughed since she went into hiding. Did she smile? Her enthusiasm was a giant improvement over the fear and worry of our previous conversations, but I still doubted that mirth ever made an appearance in her day.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Tell me the name of the school.”

  “It’s going to be called Reach For The Sky. And the subtitle is The Kick-Butt Tech School For Girls.”

  “Good name.”

  “I even have a place picked out. There’s a smallish rundown office building for sale in Oakland. It’s in a perfect area, with depressed neighborhoods on both sides. Of course, no way could I afford it. But if I could raise some money, get some grants, find an angel patron or two, I could maybe swing a mortgage. The building alone would cost a million dollars, but it would be so worth it. The layout is perfect for what we’d need. There are spaces for classrooms and dorms, too. Of course, it’s just a dream, but I checked about getting some serious broadband put in and found out it’s totally doable. Plus, I’ve looked into public transportation from there to San Jose, Santa Clara, even Palo Alto. My girls would be able to take field trips from our tech school to the greatest tech centers in the world.”

  “Where they can see just how to kick butt,” I said.

  “More than that,” she said. “I’m going to teach them to take charge. Look at how many of the biggest tech companies in the world are right here in Northern California. Google. Apple. Facebook. Hewlett-Packard. YouTube. Intel. Adobe. Twitter. Oracle. Cisco. Yahoo. eBay. PayPal. Netflix. Almost all were started by young men or even boys who knew technology and had the confidence to believe they could do something better. The systems and mechanisms for greatness are already in place. Now we need only show girls how to gain access.” Anna’s voice was so intense I could feel it over the phone. Like audible sunshine.

  “I can do that!” she continued. “Just think of it! Half of our population has been overlooked in the high-tech gold rush. It’s like when society finally opened the doors for girls to become doctors and lawyers and professors and architects and astronauts. Technology is the last frontier. When we really start teaching technology to girls, when our society lets the second half of our population into the world of technology, the coming boom will be like nothing we’ve ever seen before!”

  “It sounds great, Anna.”

  “Really?” Her voice was mixture of hope and wonder and disbelief... and a little bit of desperation.

  “Really,” I said.

  NINETEEN

  The next morning I was up before dawn. I took Spot out for a walk in the predawn twilight. Although I was still in the shady darkness from the mountain to the east behind my cabin, to the west across the lake, the Sierra crest was catching a bit of pink from the approaching sunrise, and it bounced alpenglow back to the Carson Range on the east side of Tahoe, giving a faint illumination to the forest. We followed the trail that winds north from my cabin, through the forest on the mountain slope. The fall air was crispy cold, and the birds and squirrels and chipmunks were already awake and industrious and noisy in their pre-winter preparations. Spot turned off the trail and charged through the forest, demonstrating that, whether it is their nose, their eyes, or their ears that lead them, dogs can navigate in the dark.

  Ten minutes out, where the trail curves to follow a wrinkle in the mountain’s skin, Spot ran to a large Jeffrey pine that we both had visited in the past. He sniffed it and the surrounding area with unusual interest. I stood and watched in the growing dawn light as he inspected the tree bark, the tree base, the area around the tree. Then he bounced on his front legs and stood up on his rear legs to his full six-foot-four height, his front claws gripping at the tree bark. He put his nose into the bark furrows, six feet off the ground, taking deep breaths.

  “What is it, boy?” I asked, moving forward. He ignored me, and kept up his inspection.

  Studies have indicated the breadth of the world that is available to a dog’s nose. Your dog can tell everything that you’ve eaten in the previous day or two. If you’ve been somewhere your dog has been, your dog will know it when you get home. Your dog will know if you’ve come in contact with someone he knows. Your dog can tell if you’ve been near another animal. And if it is a dog or cat or horse or some other animal that yo
ur dog has had previous contact with, he will know it even if you didn’t touch that animal. A dog can tell if a person is angry or sad or worried or happy based on that person’s smell. A dog knows if a person has merely been near another person who has smoked a cigarette or a cigar. If you buy a new brand of shampoo, your dog can tell the difference. If you switch from margarine to butter, your dog will notice. Upon meeting any woman, a dog can tell if that woman is pregnant, even before she or her doctor knows. A dog can be trained to smell a specific cancer with greater accuracy than any medical diagnostic technique. If you decide to take the stairs instead of the elevator at work, as soon as you get home your dog will be aware that something was different about your day. Dogs can even be trained to smell blood sugar on a person’s breath and warn a diabetic of an impending problem long before the person realizes it themselves. So I fervently wished that Spot could speak English and tell me what he had discovered.

  Spot dropped back down to all fours and walked S-curves here and there around the tree, sniffing the dirt.

  “What is it, boy?” I said. I squatted down, leaned back against the tree and looked through the forest toward the view I’d seen many times. Framed by the trees was my cabin a half-mile away, sitting small and dark across the distant mountainside.

  I stayed squatting for a minute as I considered the implications. Unfortunately, it was still too dark for me to fully inspect the site.

  By sunrise, Spot and I were driving down the mountain. The unusually cold nights of late September had turned the aspen stands a brilliant golden-orange hue. They caught the first of the sun’s rays and contrasted so strongly with the green pine forest that I thought they must look like marigolds from outer space.

  Three hours later, we were on Interstate 80 approaching the coastal ranges. I turned south on 680, the shortcut route to the South Bay and, I hoped, a quicker drive than taking the Bay Bridge into San Francisco and heading down the peninsula.

  The grassy rounded East Bay mountains shimmered their last golden glow before the rains of winter would turn them back to light green velvet. Rush hour was over as we made a fast cruise through Walnut Creek and Danville and the other communities east of the Oakland Tunnel. As the highway angled southwest, we went through the notch in the mountains and came into the giant basin of the Bay Area, a huge inland sea that was connected to the ocean by a strait so narrow that it was missed by early Spanish explorers as they sailed up the California coast.

  The air was unusually clear. I could see across the bay to the San Francisco peninsula with the redwood-capped Santa Cruz Mountains that formed its backbone. The ocean fog that sustained the great trees was just visible, pushing up from the Pacific on the far side, feathering through the giant trees where Skyline Blvd followed the ridgeline, and flowing like slow gray rivers down the valleys to the Bay.

  I cut across the north side of San Jose and turned north on 280, a candidate, as it approached Stanford, for World’s Most Beautiful Urban Freeway.

  Spot stood up in the back seat trying an ineffective stretch in the confined space. I pushed the button to crack his window, and he stuck his nose three inches out into the 70 mph wind, sniffing out the mysteries of the beautiful and undeveloped rolling landscape, the giant radio telescopes on the hilltops that listened to the whirring hum of the galaxies, the miles-long particle accelerator buried under the freeway where multiple Nobel laureates have learned about the largest aspects of the universe by smashing together the smallest bits of matter, the ancient redwoods that were already aged giants when the first Spaniards sailed north in their galleons, the fog that was older than life itself.

  Eventually, Spot suffered wind-in-the-nose fatigue, and he lay back down.

  I found the Woodside exit and drove west toward the peninsula’s mountainous ridge. Large estates were scattered in the hills, separated from each other by horse pastures, paddocks, barns and other horsy structures. I found a turnoff and then another and then a third and came to several townhouses in a row. They were each neat and tidy and a contrast to the single-family mansions nearby.

  I found the unit where Melody Sun had lived until she refinanced and got upside down on equity versus debt. The realtor’s sign was small and discreet.

  I knocked and, as I expected, no one answered. I went to the left and knocked on the neighbor’s door. No one answered. I moved to the right and knocked.

  The door opened, and an old man looked up at me. He squinted against the light.

  “Hi, I’m looking for my old friend Melody Sun who used to live next door to you. Do you know how I can find her?”

  The man squeezed his lips together, pushed them up into his nose, and shut the door in my face.

  I moved another door to the right and knocked. No answer.

  I moved yet again. Pretty soon I’d be knocking on doors in Palo Alto. I knocked on another door. A young woman answered. I repeated my speech.

  “You don’t know what happened?” The woman frowned. “Melody…” She paused, leaned out from the door and looked both directions. She looked at me, wondering, maybe, if I was safe. “Melody moved,” she finally said.

  “I know that the bank foreclosed her townhouse. But I don’t know where she moved. Can you give me a forwarding address?”

  The woman studied me for a bit. “How well did you know her?”

  “Not well. We met after her cousin Grace died. But I haven’t been in contact with her for some time. I was hoping to touch base with her again.”

  “Well, I don’t want to upset you, but Melody lost everything. Not just her house, but everything. When she left here, she had her little truck, a sleeping bag and a few clothes in the back, and that was it.”

  “Do you have any idea where she moved?” I asked.

  “That’s just it. She didn’t move anywhere. She was homeless. She said she’d be living out of her truck. See, after her cousin died, Melody met a man, got married and moved here with him. But then she lost her job, her husband took all their money before he ran off, and she had nothing for rent. I offered to let her stay with me, but she wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “Did she have a cellphone?”

  “She cancelled it,” the woman said.

  “So you have no way of contacting her?”

  “No.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Three weeks ago. I came home from work one night to see her in the driveway putting her stuff in her truck. She’d been really depressed in the months leading up to that point. Especially after she realized that her husband had emptied the bank account before he left. It was the stress of that that caused her to lose her job.”

  “I never met him. How long was he around?”

  “I don’t know. He was with her when she bought the house, and he didn’t leave until a year later. That was six months ago. Everything went downhill for her from that point. Lost the husband, her job, her money, the house. She drove off that same night that I saw her packing, and I haven’t seen her since.”

  “Do you know where she worked?”

  The woman shook her head. “Some software company.”

  “Did Melody use Sun for her last name? Or did she take her husband’s name?”

  “You ask a lot of questions.”

  “I care about her. Wouldn’t you ask questions?”

  The woman thought about it. “Melody Sun was the only way I ever knew her. I thought Sun was his name, too.”

  “Did Melody say anything to you before she left?”

  “Not much. I asked if she wanted to stay with me. I asked if I could help. I even asked if I could give her some money. But she said no to everything. And when I asked where she was going, she said that she’d heard about a women’s shelter up in Marin, someplace that’s run by a bunch of Unitarian ladies. She was thinking of going there for a day or so to get her bearings. But she said she mostly wanted to be alone, that she might just hit the road and drive to the end of the earth. I remember that it sounded kind of ominous to me.”r />
  I thanked the woman and went back to my Jeep. I called Street. When she answered, I explained what I learned.

  “Would you like me to look up the shelter online?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “If you had a better phone, you’d be able to do it from there.”

  “Yes, but it would take me two years of computer classes at the college to learn how to use the phone. If I wait two years, any chance of finding Melody will be long gone.”

  “You’re a funny guy,” Street said, no humor in her voice. She paused. “Here it is. It’s called The Connection, The Place Where Women Find Their Future. It’s a non-profit sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Ladies Auxiliary. The shelter’s address is not posted. Probably because some of the women there are pursued by bad men. But there’s a phone number. You could try that.” Street gave it to me, and I hung up and dialed.

  “Unitarian Universalist Church of Corte Madera.” A woman’s voice.

  “I’m looking for The Connection, please,” I said.

  “In what regard is your inquiry?” Guarded. Not friendly, but not unfriendly, either.

  I explained who I was and that I was trying to locate Melody Sun.

  “I’m sorry that we cannot give out any information on the phone. But perhaps you can come to our church. I’m sure you’ll understand why we need to be extremely careful. The safety of our residents comes before all else.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  The woman told me the address.

  I got back on 280 and headed up to The City, followed Highway 1 through the Presidio and headed onto the Golden Gate. The fog enshrouded the bridge, snaking in tendrils around the vehicles. Periodically, a cloud tunnel opened up a view of a ship on the water below or of Alcatraz in the distance.

  On the north side of the bridge I climbed the slope through thick fog, went through the tunnel and popped out into clear air, the fog held back by the mountain ridge that rose to the north and continued to Mt. Tam.